I've been a very sporadic writer myself. I've gone for years between stories...and then returned to the very same story, and then get distracted for a few more years. Kinda sad actually. hehe

I think before you get anywhere with writing, you have to know yourself ... and in particular know how to motivate yourself to just keep running the race. Accept that some days you'll write crap and other days you'll be basking in your own brilliance.
For me, writing every day is necessary. Either use it or lose it. I have to train myself to be in a place where I'm planning and imagining stories almost unconsciously. For me, that means write something every day.

As for those days when I’m pretty sure everything I wrote is just terrible – you know, sometimes when I go back an read it later, it isn’t so bad. Of course, then sometimes it is worse than I thought. But this is what editing is for, and if that isn’t a wonderful process for a control freak, I don’t know what is. I know I get too close to the work sometimes and it really helps to put it away for few days. Then you can read it with a more open mind (one not so cluttered with what you were trying to do and more focused on what you actually did. Sometimes what you did was just as good as what you were trying to do, even if it was quite different).

Keep plugging away at it!

What I mean in saying that all my characters are the same character is that they all speak and act in the same way. They have different backgrounds, different personalities, but sometimes--and I'm grateful it isn't always, or I'd throw my computer out a window and swear off the written word forever--no matter how hard I try, different characters say the same thing in a different voice...more or less. Does that make sense?

Ah Well,

If you try having one character that uses contractions, then have another that doesn't. Have one smoke and do all the yuck that goes with it. His home is riddled with over filled ash trays, burn marks, ect----larger than life in the smoking stero type. Have another that only wears black shirts ect. By starting out with a character sketch that sets your characters aprart physicaly, you will already be ahead.

Hope this helps.

Of couse, that's just ways of saying the same thing in a different way, which is what you said you were doing.... (which I realize now that I look over your post again)

Sounds more like you need to figure out how to think like other people -- so the words they say are coming from a different place, so to speak. That's hard to do. A way I've found that helps is to keep the character's background, goals, and experiences in mind, so I can try to adjust from my own limited point of view accordingly. They still are are going to sound the same on some level since they are all coming out of the same person.

Much blathering...

GZ

My latest--on a trip to the vet with my cat there was a guy sitting across from me with a big black cat. It had one of those big collars around it's neck to keep it from scratching a much stitched up ear.

The guy kept talking to it in a soft voice and cooing like a dove. He liked his cat! That was obvious. So what do you think he looked like?

He was a much pierced Goth type person. Black clothes, many earrings and nose rings and eyebrow rings ect. Long black fingernails--the whole shebang. And when he spoke to the vet he sounded very proper English.

What did I get from that? A modern wizard taking his familiar to the vet.

A snoop book can be a great tool.

Remember, using strict Third person limited Omniscient is good because it allows you to remain within the head of just one particular central character and see the other characters from the outside. Since, for most of us, this is how we experience "exotic" people anyway, you can believably write about characters that display attributes that you personally don't have the context to understand from a personal point of view. You can think of the POV character as a sort of version of yourself, all the other characters are "black boxes", having internal motivations, feelings, perceptions, and thoughts that you do not present to the audience. This way you can simply use your own observations about what different kinds of people act like, without engaging the knotty issue of how they think, feel, and so forth.

One thing that you should be careful of when selecting actions for these "exotic" characters, keep their actions within the bounds of what similar persons have actually, in real life, done. Yes, I am talking about defining the stereotype that such a character falls into, looking at historical (or personally known) examples of that stereotype, and limiting the possible actions of that character to actual behaviors of people belonging to the same category.

The Great Uberslacker

What is going on is that your critical skills are improving faster than your writing skills. So, you look at what you've written and realize that it isn't as great as you want it to be--and you hate it.

The thing that keeps me going on when I am in this kind of situation (and if you keep learning and improving as a writer, you'll hit it every so often) is the realization that I'm in that phase, and knowing that it will pass if I just keep working at improving my writing.

When I'm not in that phase, however, I worry that none of my skills are improving and I'm just stagnating. (Writing can be pretty stressful no matter where you are in the learning process.)

And what keeps me going then are the stories that eventually insist on being told, no matter what I think of how well I'm telling them.

For what it's worth, I started sending stories to publishers when my oldest daughter was learning to ride a tricycle. She had learned how to drive a car when I finally saw a story of mine professionally published.

There are several types of third person.

Third person limited. We are limited to description of physical objects and actions that would be noticable from a camera or peephole. We cannot read minds, feel emotions, or see things that would not be ordinarially visible, like a thrombosis forming in a varicose vein. This is the form that most movies, perforce, use.

Third person scrict limited Omniscient. We are limited to viewing the action around a given character, into whose thoughts and perceptions we can also see. We are aware of everything that the character is aware of, but nothing else except for things that may be seen or felt by the character but not consciously noted. This differs from first person mainly in gammatical person and literary convention (i.e. the convention of having first person accounts being presented as a later retelling of the events of the story by the POV character). This is the form I favor.

Third person roving Omniscient. This is a common form, where the narrator freely chooses what to tell the reader. The feelings and thoughts of characters present in any scene, or even of characters not present in a scene, as well as events in the past or the future are fair game as well. The sole criterion for inclusion is literary effect, and that is at the discretion of the author. Many great works of literature, and many more bad ones, are written in this person.

Third person full Omniscient. The narrator knows everything, and is under constraint by the rules of this format to reveal everything that has an effect on the story. As I said before, Tom Clancy is a good example of this style. The only limitations are that the events are related in a logical order. This is usually chronological, but could be methodological (tracing related causal event threads back and forth, according to how the events connect rather than in what order they occur) or spatiological (tracing either towards or away from the epicenter of the climactic action). Full Omniscient is actually fairly rare in fiction, and is more often used when presenting a comprehensive theory reconstructing actual events in an attempt to definitively explain them.

The other main option for fiction is first person. I would put these into several catagories as well.

Artificial Document, or Journalistic. In this form, the first person account is framed as a series of letters, journal entries, or reports putatively created by the POV character.

Personal Narrative. In this case, the first person account is framed as being recalled and told later, either as a memoir or cathartic account. It absolutely requires that the POV character survive the events of the story in some way able to relate the narrative later (one interesting story I read was written in two parts, the first told to a cyborg that wanted her to relate the narrative so as to be able to completely erase her memories of the events of the story, the second apphended as a justification for her actions in later deactivating this same cyborg, who was the leader of her society). For purposes of this form, survival includes survival as a ghost or angel, so long as the POV character is able to later relate the events of the story.

Informal or internal conversation. This form assumes that the POV character is in the habit of talking to themselves about what they are doing all the time. I find it an unconvincing format, and belive that it is usually used by persons that would be better served by writing in third person strict limited Omniscient, but it does have its own literary merits. It can be successfully used to help an author construct a self-justifying character that does bad things without facing the fact that they are bad. It also can produce publishable material, but because the constant self-justification that attends this use of the form, the material produced is not cheerful (thinking of something by Dostoyevsky, though that was actually cast in Journalistic mode). An alternative is to have the narrative cast as an internal conversation with a person that the character believes is watching them and can read the character's mind, God or a guardian angel, for instance. Or in SF, perhaps a telepath or cybernetically linked audience. In the latter cases, this might technically count as a Personal Narrative rather than an Informal use of first person, since you are making it explicit that the narrative is being passed on while the character is still able to do so. But if you have the person believing that they are being heard but do not evoke the reality of the intended recipient, then it is a clever use of internal conversation rather than a Personal Narrative.

Or OMNI which is the one that lets the reader into many char's heads in the same scene.

You can make up your own along the way to explain things---but these are defined terms--like past tense, like noun, verb, adverb, dependant clause, independant clause ect----

Yes, there are different degrees of limited third--but one of them is not Omni limited 3rd----

Isn’t any piece written in omniscient POV limited in its information content to some extent? Yes the narrator has at his disposal all information. Yes we can talk about the fly on the ceiling. But for the sake of story telling, there isn’t a need to share every bit of that with the reader. So not talking about the fly if it isn’t important for some reason (Plot, setting, whatever…) might actually take place in an omniscient POV. It’s the overall available scope that can be harnessed, not what actually goes down on paper that defines an omniscient POV. So information is not limited only by the POV, but also by what is important to the story.

Perhaps that paragraph of babble is more just a rethinking of the definition of what POV is. But it’s sort of interesting to think of (at least in my sometimes addled brain) in light of the “limited omniscient” discussion point made by JK earlier.

GZ

Anyway, as I mentioned before, I'm not really interested so much in what these things are called (except for the purposes of understanding one another). I'll happiliy change what I call them, but I need more complete definitions of a POV than "Or OMNI which is the one that lets the reader into many char's heads in the same scene....""If we used Limited Omnsicient we could decide to draw info from some of these characters' heads....""Limited 3rd Person POV, which can periodicaly and clearly (i.e. different chapter or space between paragraphs) change among various characters....""Omniscience shows what everyone is thinking all the time...." and so forth are just not useful definitions.

I will only say this--there are set POV's, just as ther eare set grammar and spelling rules. Frankly, I'd love to change some of the spelling rules---it would make my misspellings correct after all. That ie befor e except after---

Pick up a style book and you will find POV terms defined.

It is my belief, perhpas wrong, but the terms are defined. Feel free to mix and match----but I wonder what other editors feel about it?

If you invent something new is it going to look like POV xyz and I think it is called this or is it just going to look like a confused POV?

When I see a unkowen POV "style" I think, this person needs a better understanding of POV. Sorry, but after careful consideration I don't think your story meets our needs at this time.

All publishable fiction in the not so distant past had to be either straight allegory or artificial documentary. The development of historical renarrative (a problematic area not only because it is poorly defined but also because it includes both actual renarratives of transmitted history and artificial renarratives of imagined history as well as transitional cases in between) moved towards the establishment of third person narratives as a viable format for a fictional story, though back then there were certainly no rules governing omniscience. And of course the development of SF rapidly forced open the boundries of POV usages that were allowable. Once patently fantastic stories about traveling to the moon in a giant projectile and to the center of the earth on foot bacame popular, the old conventions of maintaining suspension of disbelief through the use of such devices as presenting the story as an actual narrative from an eyewitness to events in the story began to lose their relevence to audiences.

The use of pure third person fiction (where the author is not accounted for as a component of the fiction by way of explaining where the narrative is derived from) is actually very recent. I don't believe that standards are set forth that are firm enough to be a great help to the author.

Obviously, we want to avoid POV usages that fall radically outside of range of publishable material. But within that range, there is a lot of variability in precision that I think is left open. I've read a lot of books that had terrible POV violations for no apparent literary reason, but they got published anyway.

What I do know is based on my education and on my work. I am also a published non-fiction author. I have done a considerable amount of ghost written fiction while in Germany, and worked as an editor for a German Text Company (the same as an Agency here in the states). I currently do freelance editing and work as an assistant editor at an online magazine. I am also a teacher, though; I am taking time off from that, a year now and another to come, because I wish to devote that time to writing instead of teaching others how to write.

I have seen some incredible junk come across my desk, and I have had irate letters from those “authors” because they knew it all, and I had no idea what I was talking about.

OSC’s Characters and Viewpoint is one of the best books out there as far as defining what POV is and how to use the different variations. Frankly, I will take his word over anyone’s, as far as knowledge of the mechanics of working fiction goes.

Shawn